Alicia Adamerovich
These forms represent thoughts and feelings, I’m not trying to remake anything from our physical world; everything I’m making is psychological.
— Alicia Adamerovich
Selected Works
This is the time of the hour
January 28 - March 11, 2023
Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Alicia Adamerovich. This will be Adamerovich’s inaugural show with the gallery, and will be on view concurrently with Frieze Los Angeles. In This is the time of the hour, Adamerovich studies themes of overwhelm through introspective alien landscapes and wood sculptures that traverse the subconscious, inviting her audience to visualize their own psychological state.
The landscapes – seemingly barren with their darkened color palette and unsettling, organic surfaces of pumice, wax, and sand – come gracefully alive with radiant orbs and spiraling, structured appendages. Works like Blessed be thy cavity communicate the duality of seen and unseen, or as Adamerovich writes, “connections between emotion and the dichotomy of familiarity and alienation.”
Stylistically, the protruding and recessing contours carry over to sculpture as seen in Blaring in a vacuum. Adamerovich’s overlapping painting and sculptural practices harkens back to Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim who integrated natural materials across her body of work. These amorphous shapes are anthropomorphic and seductive in nature with soft curvatures alternately drawn from the realms of the arboreal, anatomical, and fantastical.
The physicality of Adamerovich’s process allows for an interplay between interpretations of negative space and interior illuminations. Beyond self-reflection, other references guiding This is the time of the hour are the forests of her hometown in western Pennsylvania, creatures in an 80s sci-fi feature, and ancient artifacts. The natural quality of the recycled wood is revived in futuristic forms, manipulated into uncanny, horn-like structures. Analogous to a hellmouth, the abstracted collapsing rings echo Frank Stella’s phantasmagoric experimentations, as well as remnants of the Mono-ha movement.
“These forms represent thoughts and feelings,” Adamerovich explains. “I’m not trying to remake anything from our physical world; everything I’m making is psychological.”
Adamerovich’s work recalls the dreamlike renderings of Agnes Pelton, and Georgia O'Keefe's color sensibility. The voyeuristic portals found in her work articulated through surreal tenebrosity allow a glimpse into something strangely intimate and private, though welcoming of individual interpretation: “Although the experiences I’m able to create are personal, I think the ‘hard-to-place-ness” of being alive is universal in its absolute ridicule. Absurdity is a deeply familiar sensation and it runs deep throughout. It has everything to do with living in today's world.”
Selected Press
About the Artist
Born 1989, Latrobe, PA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Alicia Adamerovich’s works are representations of introspective journeys, couching emotion in the landscape of the subconscious. Often grounded in a sense of isolation, her paintings, drawings, and sculptural frames exist in a world that is at once achingly familiar and wholly alien. It is in this dichotomy of attraction and disdain, joy and pain, and expansion and compression where Adamerovich fashions moonlit feeling into terrains of apprehension and disquiet. At the same time, Adamerovich is acutely aware of her audience and invites them to take part in the creation. As Adamerovich states: “I don’t wish for my frames to be vessels for the work, but instead to be extensions of the line... making connections with both the viewer’s body and mind. Immersing oneself is bringing the experience closer to my own experience of creation.”